“Pardon, monsieur,” said the servant to whom I had spoken. “Behold a gentleman who is reading it.”
I had beheld the gentleman before. That morning I had seen him on the Promenade des Anglais, and that afternoon I had seen him again in this club, where I had heard him talking over the green baize at baccarat. He was a pleasant-looking chap in Saville Row clothes, which he wore with a sort of studied negligence. He wore also a monocle, and his voice was deeply Belgravian.
In that voice he addressed me: “You are asking for the Figaro. Let me relinquish it to you.”
As he spoke, he got up from a chair in which he had been seated, and approached me, the paper in his hand.
In my own hand was the novel, a story by Eric Hereward, which I put on the table before us.
He glanced at the book. “Do you find it interesting?”
“I have not opened it,” I answered.
Before he could say more—that is, if he had intended to—Spencer Poole, an Englishman whom I had long known, sauntered up and joined us.
“If this is a private conversation,” he threw out, “I should like to hear it. Otherwise, I will go away.”
“You may,” I told him. “We were talking opiates.”
“Let us all go,” Poole affably resumed. “There are a thousand louis in the bank. Don’t you want some of them? I know I do.”
“I would rather not add to them,” I remarked.
But already Poole had turned, the other man with him, and I followed them into an adjoining room, where, about a long, oval table that was colored with bank notes, with hillocks of gold, with patches of cards, a crowd of members were gaming.
The room, saturated with tobacco smoke, resounded with brief exclamations, with the announcement of points. Fronting it, two windows that reached to the floor opened on a balcony and the night.
Idly, after a moment, I passed through one of them. A chair stretched its arms to me. Above were the stars, and beyond, on the inky syrup of the Mediterranean, a warship rode. The vessel was strung with lights, and from it, faintly over the waters, a tinkle of music came.
“You don’t play?”
I turned. The man who had offered me the Figaro was drawing a chair beside me.
“You see,” I said, “it seems to me that there is but one thing stupider than winning money you have not earned, and that is losing it.”
He adjusted his monocle. “What I like is the hazard of it. Yet is there such a thing as hazard? I hardly think so.”
He paused, got out a gold case, offered it, and, on my declining, extracted a cigarette, lit it, and, a bit ponderously, inquired whether I believed in fate.
“Not after dinner,” I told him. Ordinarily I would have said nothing of the kind, but I divined that he wanted to use me for a sewer, and, at the moment, I did not care to be so employed. Yet, civility prompting, I added: “Why do you ask?”
“Because I fancy that anyone who really thinks—so few people do think—must believe that somewhere—beyond, above, yet about us—there is a power that knows neither mercy nor wrath, but that compels every cause, great or small, to work out its inevitable results.”
“Let me,” I interrupted, “translate you if I may. As you mete it to others, so shall it be measured unto you.”
“Precisely. You at least believe in that?”
“Whether I have dined or not, I do.”
“I am glad to hear you say so. I have such a curious case in point. Would it bore you if I run it over?”
I felt that it would, but I assured him to the contrary, and for surcease let my thoughts wander among the stars. When they returned to earth, or, more exactly, to the balcony, he was telling of a maiden’s beauty:
“Fancy a lily that for perfume has a heart, and you may perhaps see Janet Mar as I saw her when, for her perdition, she came to Stratton. In my life I have seen nothing fairer. Her hair was a turban of gold, her eyes were pools of purple, her features were those of a Psyche on a fan, and she conveyed just that suggestion of unmateriality that the old masters gave to figures whom they represented as floating off the canvas into space. A painter would have admired her for what she expressed, a poet would have loved her for what she was.
“That, from the ambush where it lurked, fate should have sprung and felled a human flower such as she is explicable only on a theory that I will set before you. But that the point of it may be clearer, other pictures must be shown, and primarily that of her brother, who was her twin, and who worshiped her as only a twin brother could worship a sister so adorably constructed, and so constructed to be adored.
“Together they completed one another. What was fragile in her he made up in strength; what was material in him, her spirituality attenuated. Had you not known they were brother and sister you would have said: ‘There is the ideal couple!’ In some former life perhaps they were.”
“What!” I exclaimed.
“Well, yes, why not?” my companion rejoined. “For if we believe in fate, it is difficult not to believe that we have been here before. Nothing else explains the inequitable inequalities of life. Nothing else explains why some are rich and some are poor; why some are wise and many are not; why some are strong and others weak. Nothing else can give the reason of our joys and sorrows. As in former days, we have meted it to others, so now is it measured unto us.
“Yet, of course, the theory is, I admit, heretical, and if I offer it, it is because it is the one hypothesis that frames this girl. Without it, she would present but a fair portrait smeared, and
